A cocaine laboratory explosion killed seven people and injured 10 Friday, January 23, on Colombia’s Pacific coast near the border with Ecuador, police said Friday. A preliminary investigation found a gas cylinder exploded while being used to make the drug, police colonel John Jairo Urrea told local media via video.

A dissident group called the National Coordinator of the Bolivarian Army, a faction of the defunct FARC guerrilla group, confirmed the incident.

“Due to human error and the handling of gas cylinders… the place went up in flames in a matter of seconds,” the group said in a statement.

The dissident faction rejected a 2016 peace agreement in Colombia that ended decades of fighting, and it remains in talks with the leftist government of President Gustavo Petro.

The lab was in a cocaine-producing area with a heavy presence of illegal armed groups in Awa Indigenous territory, in the southwestern department of Narino. The region has been crucial to cocaine trafficking to the United States for decades, and drug smugglers have strengthened their local control with the help of Mexican cartels.

“What was a cocaine laboratory doing in a peace zone?” Petro said in a speech Friday in which he decried the illicit crop.

Ecuador’s conservative president Daniel Noboa launched a trade war with Colombia on Wednesday by imposing a 30% tariff and accusing Petro’s government of not doing enough to curb drug trafficking along their shared border. Petro hit back with the same tariff and defended his efforts against illegal drug traffickers.

After facing similar accusations from US President Donald Trump over the past year, Petro is slated to travel to Washington for meetings with his US counterpart on February 3.